Engineered Gate-Based Nanoscaled JK Flip-Flop: Design, Simulation and Applications

In this paper, we design and simulate a novel, highly compact and power-efficient silicon-based JK flip-flop (JKFF) employing an engineered gate technique, for the first time. Herein, the pull-down and the pull-up paths used to realize the JKFF have been realized by 4 and 2 engineered gate transistors, respectively (total six), whereas 8 pull-ups and 8 pull-down (total 16) transistors are used to realize the JK flip-flip in the conventional MOS technology. Two-dimensional (2D) calibrated mixed-mode simulations have revealed substantial improvement in various performance measuring parameters of the proposed JK flip-flop. The proposed technique has resulted in a significant reduction of 62.5% in transistor count, similar to 9.12% in power consumption, 2.5% decrease in delay and 11.38% in power delay product in comparison to the conventional JKFF realization. Further, the proposed gate-engineered JKFF has been used to realize highly compact D and T flip-flops. It has been observed that a 55.5% and 62.5% decrease in transistor count have been achieved in comparison to the conventional MOS-based JKFF realization of D and T flip-flops, respectively. A significant improvement in power consumption, delay, and power delay products has been achieved in the proposed D and T flip-flops in comparison to the conventional JKFF-based D and T flips. It has been observed that notably, the versatility of this approach allows for straightforward adaptation to realize various other sequential and combinational circuits. Besides, the process flow for the fabrication of the proposed engineered gate transistors for realizing the JKFF, D and T flip-flops has also been given.